At 14:16 2000/06/04 -0500, "Patrick" <patrickfwd@yahoo.com> wrote: >Although this is a tad off topic I thought it would be okay. With all this >talk of CGRO being deorbited, I was wondering when the Earth's Moon is >scheduled to enter (or depending on your point of view, reenter) the >atmosphere. I've heard that they recently measured the distance to the moon >to within inches, so I would think this could be figured out. Anyone know? Hi! The Moon is not expected to "reenter" anytime soon, not at least in my lifetime :-) The moon's orbit semiaxis in fact gets bigger at a mean rate of 38.4 mm/year due mainly to the gravitational pull from the tides the moon itself generates. On the other hand, the lenght of the earth's day increases at more or less 1.4 ms per century on average in order to conservate angular momentum. Greetings, -- Ruben Velasco <heston@arrakis.es> 37.3906N 6.0008W +39m WGS84 PGP KeyID 37219E45 Fingerprint = 96575B8713370081 1BC5D43D324B3F4D ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jun 04 2000 - 13:34:53 PDT